Bad taste in Imagine This

Thursday 20 November 2008 00:00 BST

Valiant struggle: Peter Polycarpou as Daniel with Nathan Attard who plays the boy Leon in Imagine This

I am afraid a bad-taste warning needs to be attached to this unfortunate new musical. The talented director, Timothy Sheader and his team of ardent, forceful actors and dancers are not to blame. They struggle valiantly to rise above the offensively banal, soft-pop music that limps in train with the fatuities and ineptitude of David Goldsmith’s trivial lyrics. Glenn Berenbeim’s book relates the heroic defiance of Jews against ancient Romans in Masada to those against the Nazis in Warsaw. But the closing number of Imagine This sprays the wasteland of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942, from which thousands of starving, penned-in Jews were deported for extermination in far-away gas chambers, with the glucose balm of optimism and romantic fantasy: two lovers escape the Nazi machine-guns. She switches on a merry-go-round musical box and they sing to lyrics that would not disgrace a television commercial for Pilates, to music of aural-wallpaper quality of "how we chose, standing upright, to remain upstanding upright, Not to live life on our knees."

An attempt is made to raise audience morale, encouraging people to leave the theatre in a modestly feel-good state. Yet to strike these musical notes of defiance is historically false.

Although in 1943 hundreds of gloriously heroic Jews fought to the death in the Ghetto, most went passively, "not standing upright" to their ghastly fate. If Berenbeim had dared to end the musical in a mood of honest, down-lift then at least Imagine This would have been notable for its truthfulness.

Yet while classical opera and elitist musicals as good as Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd end in tragedy spectacular, popular ones never do. This one is no exception. The opening scene, with Jews riding on a neon-lit merry-go-round and singing the plaintive lyrics of The Last Day Of Summer exudes heavy-handed romanticism. Thereafter in designer Eugene Lee’s dilapidated train-shed an atmosphere of fear, tension and menace suitably reigns, thanks to Sheader’s impressive production. To raise falling spirits these Jews are acting a play based upon their forebears’ defiance at Masada: of course that past bears down upon the present. Love offers the connection.

The couple sing unethnic love-songs, which sound disconcertingly similar in either century. Berenbeim rigs his occasionally comic plot: the Masada resisters inspire those in the Ghetto to be rebellious. It would have been more dramatic though if Imagine This had concentrated upon Warsaw and had removed the unconvincing plot-line that involves Peter Polycarpou’s authoritative Jewish leader in a campaign to convince his actors they should kill themselves rather than become Nazi stooges. In any case the music and songs of Imagine This never do justice to its terrifying theme.

Imagine This New London Theatre Drury Lane (corner of Parker Street), WC2B 5PW